Day 26 Name the thing you admire most about them?
Both become very strong independent people with a sense of duty, responsibility and yes, sacrifice and I think this is the level on which they really connect. I like that the depth of their connection seems to remain even though they're apart (wish that had been explained a bit more) and when they come together again they're so relaxed in one another's presence and it's not angsty but soothing.
Day 27: Do you think you could, one day, stop loving Buffy/Angel or become a Spuffy fan?
Ooh I've been waiting to get to this question! I've been thinking about it a lot - seriously, I made notes!
I don't know if I could stop loving Buffy/Angel. It's been over 10 years since I watched BtVS and if I haven't changed my preference since then I don't know if I'm ever going to. If I was a comics fan then I might have given up on them but after the Twilight disaster in order to preserve my sanity I can no longer consider them canon. (So it might actually be a good thing that S8 ended in caricature - at least it allows me to still enjoy canon B/A. Had Angel acted like a more in-character douchebag within a well-told story then it would be harder to dismiss).
The Spuffy question is an interesting one. I have recently come to understand it more, especially since I've been re-acquainting myself with fandom, Buffy-scholarship and then joined BB. I can certainly see why lots of fans do ship it, aside from the James Marsters attraction and the 'Angel/Bangel is boring' sentiments (though those are not small factors). I'd say the main points are as follows:
- Complex development - which I put down to circumstances of writing: Spuffy has the pure advantage of coming in the later seasons, by when the show's writing had matured in certain ways. Although I think seasons 6 and 7 have far more glaring weaknesses than the earlier ones, the very fact that they are late gave the writers greater opportunity for establishing retroactive continuity and layering of ideas, which enabled a slower development over 4 seasons. The dialogue is also tighter overall. You can see things like the words 'beneath you' from S5 coming back in S7, obviously the idea of slayers and death comes back in S6 and is explored primarily via Spuffy. Basically by the time actual Spuffy came along in S6, they had five seasons worth of ideas to draw and expand on.
- 'Realness' or 'adultness' - I think this is linked to the point above. These two concepts tend to be equated with 'complexity'. It's real because its complex and messy. While I don't agree - a lot of my friends are in stable long-term relationships with their first boyfriends and I haven't seen anything so conflict-ridden amongst anyone I know (then again no-one I know has ever been thwarted by a gypsy curse either!) - I get the attraction to a story which explores a tense shifting dynamic between two adults.
- Female sexuality: Despite the mutual abuse in a very depressing season, a lot of fans are drawn to the unrestrained sexuality Buffy was allowed in S6. I think that's one of the reasons it's not seen as that unhealthy by some: Buffy was allowed the agency of acting on her darker desires and was often the aggressor and so in a sense it was empowering.
- Shadow Self: One reading of Spuffy I do find really interesting is the Jungian idea of Spike, like Faith, functioning as Buffy's shadow-self, forcing her to confront then reconcile the darker side of her Slayerness. This is an idea I actually like and it's one of the reasons I think Spike's function, at least symbolically, in Buffy's story in S6 is intriguing.
-Inverse parallels with Bangel arc: you know, the whole 'Angel lost his humanity by being with Buffy, but Spike went to get his humanity by being with Buffy' yadda yadda.. etc...
-Spike chooses to get his soul: I can see why this part is compelling. The narrative of a monster learning to overcome his nature and turn good is a longstanding and much-loved one.
So yeah, I can appreciate all of this, but then there are the things I have problems with:
- Spike's plot armour. I love the character and he does fill a much needed role within the Scooby dynamic, but by the later seasons I can't help but feel like I'm being manipulated into liking him, moreso than with any other character besides maybe Andrew (naturally all fiction is about the art of audience manipulation, but you get what I mean). He's written differently by different people and by the time we get to S5 I sometimes feel like I'm just watching a writer's enamoured obsession.
- The issue of Spike's 'humanity' and the erosion of his vampirism: By the late seasons there's just no point in him even being a vampire, as it plays no actual part in his actions. Even the AR is done in human face, which undermines the intention of showing that he was still a demon. It's never presented as a demonic act. This ties in with my issues of the presentation of 'vampiric evil'. In the earlier seasons vamps were shown to objectively know the difference between good and evil, they just didn't care because their lack of souls frees them from that. It's what allows them to be effective predators and it's why Spike can mock the Scoobies for being goodie-goodies. In later seasons Spike's soullessness is portrayed more like a lack of understanding of emotional or social cues, like a puppy that doesn't know why chewing it's owner's slippers is wrong.
Anyway, most of my other humanity-related arguments on this have been made before by myself and others so I'm not going to go over them too much, but I want to add that if demon-can-do-good-things-out-of-choice Spike is presented as a sort of 'base self' which develops, gets a soul then is complete, then it would mean that Angel's base self is Angelus. This would then undermine his entire journey since everything he does would just be a futile denial of his true 'evil' self which doesn't want to be redeemed. Which would mean I wasted a lot of my time watching AtS.
Tbh the more I think about it, the more S5-7 feel like a whole new show with a new reinvented mythology, allowing the 'monster is changed through love of a woman' archetype to play out, which it couldn't really do before. There's actually nothing wrong with that narrative in itself, it's just that it requires an overturning of the rules to happen. Had they not established a soul mythology with Angel beforehand, then it would probably work much better.
- Fandom has soured me on the ship - I do feel there was/is a romanticisation of Spuffy/Spike which I just couldn't get on board with and I really couldn't agree with the 'she loves him, she's just in denial in S6' view. It's not entirely fans' fault as the writers themselves seemed to encourage it through their writing which made him just way too nice at times, but it had the converse effect of making me more resistant. This coupled with the denigration of Bangel for stupid reasons made me realise I couldn't ever fully identify with that section of the fandom - although I do recognise there are differences in opinion even amongst them. When I was younger I used to struggle more with navigating fandom opinion. Even though I wasn't really actively involved in fandom, the characterisation of B/A as 'teenage' and the sheer volume of Spuffy meta which exalted its complexity and 'high art' did make me feel as if there was something wrong with me. As someone with a strong academic side, if there's one thing I hate it's the feeling that I am failing to understand something, so I have made an effort to understand it and I think I really do now. I'm just equally able to apply my critical faculties against it and I find it still doesn't work for me. I also find some of the recurring criticisms of B/A somewhat unfair and that makes me inclined to defend it more - that's the polarising effect of fandom I guess.
- Ultimately the biggest issue for me is the soul canon. If you're setting up a fantasy world, even one which is a loose mish mash of tropes, you still have to develop your initial mythological parameters rather than giving us a whole new inverse one mid-way through and asking us to equate the two, just because. I think that to be a Spuffy fan you have to accept or be able to justify the alteration to the soul canon, which despite the dynamics between the two characters, I simply cannot do. Will I ever be able to?...No idea, but probably unlikely. I'll let you guys know if I do then you can pelt me with fruits and various meats!😛
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Finally, in terms of story continuation, again I can see why people prefer the apparent 'open-endedness' of Spuffy over what some may think of Buffy/Angel as a ship continually governed by fate and destiny with the whole 'star-crossed lovers' thing, but it's not how I see them. I personally don't believe in fate and I think one of the strengths of AtS (most of the time anyway) was that it did introduce complex ideas of fate and destiny through the PTBs and prophecies, and did ultimately come to question them. Of course by the end of the show Angel hasn't quite extricated himself from the ideas of predestination that seem to govern him, but I always thought that that would be the next thing to tackle in his story. It's sort of what they worked towards in AtF, where W&H mess with him again and the Shanshu issue returns suggesting Angel is going to be on the side of evil, but by the end he says 'I'm just here to help'. The end of the run put him in a good position to start forgoing these ideas again, to say 'screw prophecy' and return to the basics of helping the helpless regardless. I think this should have been the next step, like a reprise of S2, only stronger.
Buffy herself overturned the patriarchal constraints on her destiny with Chosen (though the flip side was the forced-slayer powers on everyone else, which was actually something that needed to be explored more) and I think her story along with the Scoobies, should have gradually ventured into the darker territories that Angel's had sort of vacated, dealing with not the evil of monsters, but the systemic evil that makes the world go round. The conditions for Bangel from Angel's side would be, I think, acceptance of his past including reconciliation with his family-related crimes, finding a balance with his dark side (they might sort of be trying for these two in S11 from what I've heard, but very poorly) and the continuation of the fight. He needs to complete his journey of self-knowledge while working towards the light despite knowing cosmic redemption is impossible. This could have been done solidly over two or three seasons but nobody writing the comics seems to understand this and going by S8, Joss lost sight of it too.
Both Buffy and Angel's journeys - and all the characters actually - essentially revolve around the question of 'who am I'. To use Buffy's dire analogy, she thinks she's going to be cookies someday but really the point of life is that we're never completely cookies. We're never finished because there's always something round the corner that will change things or cause us to question things. You're always finding out something new. We need to let go of the idea of Bangel as 'first love', which is what S8 got wrong because it presented them through the lens of their S2 relationship, which as Cordy and Wes proved is ripe for satire. A future relationship is (or was?) doable if you start from who the are now. I want something new, fresh, a radical reworking of what was but which builds on the 'two old soldiers' dynamic of 'The Yoko Factor' rather than 'star-crossed lovers'. Like I've said before - for me it's about potential.
/end essay.
